Subject: [PATCH v2 3/4] add-interactive: manually fall back color config to color.ui

From: Jeff King <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 Sep 2025 12:42:39 -0400

Color options like color.interactive and color.diff should fall back to
the value of color.ui if they aren't set. In add-interactive, we check
the specific options (e.g., color.diff) via repo_config_get_value(),
which does not depend on the main command having loaded any color config
via the git_config() callback mechanism.

But then we call want_color() on the result; if our specific config is
unset then that function uses the value of git_use_color_default. That
variable is typically set from color.ui by the git_color_config()
callback, which is called by the main command in its own git_config()
callback function.

This works fine for "add -p", whose add_config() callback calls into
git_color_config(). But it doesn't work for other commands like
"checkout -p", which is otherwise unaware of color at all. People tend
not to notice because the default is "auto", and that's what they'd set
color.ui to as well. But something like:

  git -c color.ui=false checkout -p

should disable color, and it doesn't.

This regression goes back to 0527ccb1b5 (add -i: default to the built-in
implementation, 2021-11-30). In the perl version we got the color config
from "git config --get-colorbool", which did the full lookup for us.

The obvious fix is for git-checkout to add a call to git_color_config()
to its own config callback. But we'd have to do so for every command
with this problem, which is error-prone. Let's see if we can fix it more
centrally.

It is tempting to teach want_color() to look up the value of
repo_config_get_value("color.ui") itself. But I think that would have
disastrous consequences. Plumbing commands, especially older ones, avoid
porcelain config like "color.*" by simply not parsing it in their config
callbacks. Looking up the value of color.ui under the hood would
undermine that.

Instead, let's do that lookup in the add-interactive setup code. We're
already demand-loading other color config there, which is probably fine
(even in a plumbing command like "git reset", the interactive mode is
inherently porcelain-ish). That catches all commands that use the
interactive code, whether they were calling git_color_config()
themselves or not.

Reported-by: Isaac Oscar Gariano <[email-masked]>
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <[email-masked]>
---
 add-interactive.c          |  9 +++++++++
 t/t3701-add-interactive.sh | 15 +++++++++++++++
 2 files changed, 24 insertions(+)

diff --git a/add-interactive.c b/add-interactive.c
index 877160d298..4604c69140 100644
--- a/add-interactive.c
+++ b/add-interactive.c
@@ -45,6 +45,15 @@ static int check_color_config(struct repository *r, const char *var)
 		ret = -1;
 	else
 		ret = git_config_colorbool(var, value);
+
+	/*
+	 * Do not rely on want_color() to fall back to color.ui for us. It uses
+	 * the value parsed by git_color_config(), which may not have been
+	 * called by the main command.
+	 */
+	if (ret < 0 && !repo_config_get_value(r, "color.ui", &value))
+		ret = git_config_colorbool("color.ui", value);
+
 	return want_color(ret);
 }
 
diff --git a/t/t3701-add-interactive.sh b/t/t3701-add-interactive.sh
index 6b400ad9a3..d9fe289a7a 100755
--- a/t/t3701-add-interactive.sh
+++ b/t/t3701-add-interactive.sh
@@ -1321,6 +1321,12 @@ test_expect_success 'stash accepts -U and --inter-hunk-context' '
 	test_grep "@@ -2,20 +2,20 @@" actual
 '
 
+test_expect_success 'set up base for -p color tests' '
+	echo commit >file &&
+	git commit -am "commit state" &&
+	git tag patch-base
+'
+
 for cmd in add checkout commit reset restore "stash save" "stash push"
 do
 	test_expect_success "$cmd rejects invalid context options" '
@@ -1337,6 +1343,15 @@ do
 		test_must_fail git $cmd --inter-hunk-context 2 2>actual &&
 		test_grep -E ".--inter-hunk-context. requires .(--interactive/)?--patch." actual
 	'
+
+	test_expect_success "$cmd falls back to color.ui" '
+		git reset --hard patch-base &&
+		echo working-tree >file &&
+		test_write_lines y |
+		force_color git -c color.ui=false $cmd -p >output.raw 2>&1 &&
+		test_decode_color <output.raw >output &&
+		test_cmp output.raw output
+	'
 done
 
 test_done
-- 
2.51.0.462.g0a0e5b9b75